Obama’s energy policy: Where’s the laughter?

Writing about Obama’s energy policy in yesterday’s N&R, George Will asks where’s the laughter?

Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both — billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

….Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (see above). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: “I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming — an 80 percent reduction by 2050.”

….In 1996, Bob Dole, citing the Clinton campaign’s scabrous fundraising, exclaimed: “Where’s the outrage?” In this year’s campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter?

Meanwhile, N&R columnist Lorraine Ahearn uses a little sand castle imagery to voice opposition to drilling off the N.C. coast:

Hunched over this single task, Suzzy has been working all afternoon building the sand fortress, blind to the tide coming in behind her sunburned back.

So when the inevitable surge flattens every tower and parapet, fills in the moat and leaves the beach a clean slate, she looks briefly pained. Then a slow grin spreads across her face. She can’t possibly be surprised.

Even a 10-year-old knows this is no place to build a fortress. Let alone, an offshore oil rig. That’s why we call it the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

……If candidates think offshore drilling will get votes, it’s up to voters to show leadership. This is our coastline, our treasure. Should we venture where fools go, and where disaster strikes as inevitably as high tide strikes a sand castle, will we really be surprised?